A work in progress. Very slow progress. Slow and frustrating progress. Perhaps not even any progress at all.

I can't think of the last time I was this frustrated with anything.
Sounds a bit dramatic, perhaps, but I have no idea what I'm doing. InDesign is simple enough with my rudimentary knowledge, but there are a fair amount of things that I can't do at my skill level.
Say for example I have this image:













It looks perfectly fine, which it is. But I want to put this logo on top of an orange background, which I do. However, it has a white square behind it, because it is a square image. So how do I get rid of the white background? I've tried editing the image in Photoshop, but I have never used photoshop before today in my life, and therefore (logically) do not know what I'm doing. I have spent probably an hour trying to fiddle with this blasted penguin, but to no avail.

The same basic problem applied to this image as well:

The issue with this photograph is that, unlike the penguin above, I WANT it to have a white background. I only want to see the pile of books, and not the table and whatever is behind it. So once again I tried my hand at photoshop, and once again failed.

Another major issue I have come across is that of the internet. Frankly, it has let me down. I have discovered today that Google images is only so helpful. It has reached the point where I have looked up ever variation and combination of "classic penguin" "penguin book design" "penguin books" "tschichold" "penguin classics" (and so on) possible, and have probably scoured through every image labeled with one of these tags in an effort to gather a large enough selection of images to work with in my layouts. However, there are not very many pictures that fall into the category of what I am looking for, and those that do are of such extremely low quality and small size that they would be impossible to work with.

One more small qualm I have is the fact that we have been restricted to the Helvetica neue font family. However, my designer had his own typefaces that he created and which I have conveniently downloaded onto my computer. Why am I restricted to Helvetica when I could write about Tschichold in the font that he himself designed?

And as a final conundrum, the new sized grid is presenting a variety of issues that did not come about while I was working with the original grid. It is being all kinds of crazy. For starters, why are the vertical lines purple instead of blue like the horizontal guide lines? And why are the purple vertical guidelines in groups of two while the blue horizontal guides only have one? Why does a pink box outline remain around certain things after I have hit the "W" key to get rid of the guides?

I feel desperately confused and utterly helpless.